We formulate a version of the Cosmological Argument that deploys an epistemic principle of explanation in place of the traditional Principle of Sufficient Reason. The epistemic principle asserts that if there is a possible explanation of a fact, and some proposition is entailed by that explanation and by every other possible explanation of that fact, it is reasonable to accept that proposition. We try to show that there is a possible explanation of the fact that there are contingent beings and (...) that any possible explanation of this fact presupposes that there is a necessary being. We conclude that it is reasonable to believe that there is a necessary being. (shrink)

"Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) was an influential theologian and philosopher widely known as the leader of the seventeenth-century Jansenist movement and as the author of the Fourth Objections to Descartes's Meditations. This collection of essays examines the relationship between philosophy and theology in Arnauld's thought, as well as his contribution to the development of Cartesianism and his role in the continuation of medieval disputes in the seventeenth century." "What emerges in the essays is the essential unity of Arnauld's thought. Arnauld is (...) revealed in the volume as a figure who wanted to embrace the new philosophy while remaining loyal to the medieval theological tradition. His attempt to defend this position and his considerable skill at logical analysis are discussed throughout. The essays deal with such topics as Arnauld's attitude towards the Cartesian doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths and his views on miracles, theodicy, and the compatibility of grace and free will." "This volume makes an important contribution to the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, theology, and the history of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Thomas Ricketts has developed a powerful interpretation of Frege on judgment, truth and logic. Recently, Ricketts has modified his reading, holding that judgment is an act of knowledge-acquisition; this rules out incorrect judgment. I argue that Ricketts goes too far here. I criticize the textual basis for Ricketts's new view, and show that the interpretive problems which led him to this change can be met without such extreme measures. Thus, I defend Ricketts' earlier view against his own later modification. Along (...) the way I discuss Kant and Brentano on judgment, and I explore Fregean argument concerning the objectivity of truth. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Life of Arnauld Four Basic Philosophical Themes Arnauld and Descartes Arnauld and Malebranche Arnauld and Leibniz Arnauld's Philosophical Legacy.

Miller's metaphysics, including his approach to God, is broad, deep, and original, with the potential to make a fruitful contribution to contemporary philosophy. Yet it has not received the critical attention it deserves. Miller's work deserves critical attention because of its thorough and original defense of three highly controversial positions: that existence is a real property of concrete individuals; that it is possible to prove, without assuming any principle of sufficient reason, that there is an uncaused cause of the universe; (...) and that the uncaused cause is the simple God of classical theism. Miller's position on existence is an important alternative in current analytical philosophy to what Miller calls the "Frege-Russell-Quine" theory, and the neo-Meinongian positions of Terence Parsons and Ed Zalta. Miller's argument for an uncaused cause of the universe has been described one of the most ambitious theistic arguments produced by a well-respected, contemporary, analytic philosopher. Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God is the first clear, systematic interpretation of Miller's theistic philosophy. (shrink)

Many distinct, controvertial issues are to be found within the labyrinthine\ntwists and turns of the problem of evil. For philosophers of the\nseventeenth and early eighteenth centures, evil presented a challenge\nto the consistency and rationality of the world-picture disclosed\nby the new way of ideas. In dealing with this challenge, however,\nphilosophers were also concerned with their positions in the theological\ndebates about original sin, free will, and justification that were\nthe legacy of the Protestant Reformation to European intellectual\nlife. Emerging from a conference on the (...) problem of evil in the early\nmodern period held at the University of Toronto in 1999, the papers\nin this collection represent some of the best original work being\ndone today on the theodicies of such early modern philosophers as\nLeibniz, Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 123-124 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Textes philosophiques: conclusions philosophiques. Dissertation en deux parties sur la vision des vérités en Dieu et l'amour de la vertu. Régle du bon sens. De la liberté de l'homme Antoine Arnauld. Textes philosophiques: conclusions philosophiques. Dissertation en deux parties sur la vision des vérités en Dieu et l'amour de la vertu. Régle du bon (...) sens. De la liberté de l'homme. Épiméthée. Translated by Denis Moreau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. Pp. xi + 333. Cloth, FF 198.00. This collection should prove useful to anyone doing research on Antoine Arnauld, or more generally on philosophical theology in seventeenth-century France. The collection contains excellent French translations of three Latin texts, and a scholarly, if not critical, edition of a fourth text that appeared originally in French. They are accompanied by helpful [End Page 123] introductions and copious scholarly notes. A bibliography of 533 secondary works on Arnauld is provided.Studies of Arnauld's philosophy have concentrated on his polemics with Malebranche and Leibniz. Moreau suggests that Arnauld's philosophy is worth studying in its own right, and the texts he has selected provide a start for such a study. The first text, Conclusiones Philosophicae, is a set of theses composed by Arnauld for defense by one of his students in 1641, when Arnauld himself was twenty-nine years old. It is our only record of Arnauld's early philosophical thought. Moreau points out that Conclusiones anticipates themes developed by Arnauld during the rest of his long career, and that the text is also valuable as an indicator of the sort of philosophical questions being discussed in Paris at the time that Descartes wrote the Meditations. The original Latin and Moreau's French translation are given on facing pages.The second and third texts in the collection, Dissertatio Bipartita and Régles du Bon Sens, were parts of a debate within Jansenist circles near the end of Arnauld's life. Arnauld's friend, and his collaborator in the Port-Royal Logic, Pierre Nicole, had introduced into Port-Royal the speculation that every human being receives a "grace générale" that makes it possible for her to perform morally good actions. Arnauld attacked this theory in the late 1680s. Given the Augustinian assumption that an action is morally good only if it is directed to God as the agent's final end, and given that some people have never thought about God, the theory of a grace générale raised a philosophical question: How could someone who has no knowledge of God act out of the love of God? Nicole's answer was that the grace générale given to every human being brings with it a sort of implicit, confused, and imperceptible knowledge and love of God. In defense of this answer, Nicole refers to a thesis written by the Louvain theologian Gommaire Huygens, also a friend of Arnauld's, and defended by one of Huygens's students in 1688. Huygens says that anyone who has knowledge of a necessary and immutable truth sees that truth "in the first and uncreated truth, which is God," and that anyone who loves chastity or any other moral virtue, by that very fact loves "the eternal reason of chastity, which is in God." These positions seemed to support the notion that everyone might have an implicit knowledge and love of God even if some have never consciously thought about God. Arnauld attacked these claims in 1692 in his Latin Dissertatio bipartita, of which Moreau provides a French translation. Nicole was impressed and disturbed by the Dissertatio, confessing that he did not know how to respond. He asked another mutual friend of his and Arnauld's, the Benedictine François Lamy, to answer Arnauld. In reply to Lamy, Arnauld wrote... (shrink)

The first chapter explores the theory developed in Kripke's "Outline of a Theory of Truth." A tension in Kripke's account of the concept of truth is revealed--a conflict between two intuitions. The first intuition, called the "fixed point conception of truth," is that the whole meaning of the truth predicate is given by the formula "we may assert of a sentence that it is true iff we may assert that sentence." The second intuition, called the "thesis of the supervenience of (...) semantics," is that the interpretation of the truth predicate is determined by the interpretations of all the other non-logical constants of the language. I show that these two intuitions cannot be reconciled within the context of Kripke's theory, and I argue for the choice of the fixed point conception of truth over the principle of the supervenience of semantics. Chief among the considerations that I advance is the fact that the fixed point conception of truth yields a natural logic of truth. In the second chapter I present that logic of truth in the form of a cut-free sequent calculus. I then turn, in chapter three, to a discussion of the significance of such cut-free sequent calculi. I argue that we may view the sequent calculus introduction rules for a logical constant as giving the meaning of that constant, under certain conditions. In particular, we can see our logic of truth as providing an explication of our intuitive concept of truth which complements Kripke's original model-theoretic explication. The fourth chapter takes up some criticisms of Kripke's theory which center on the logic of truth. In addition, the general ideas developed in the first three chapters are applied in a discussion of the various schemes of three-valued logic which can be used in the development of Kripke's approach. Finally, in the last chapter, it is shown that Kripke's technical concepts, and the logical ideas developed in the second and third chapters, can be used to provide a unified account of many contexts in which paradox arises. (shrink)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Pragmatists in Venice Alexander Kremer... 5 I. Philosophy and human evolution Persons as Natural Artifacts Joseph Margolis... 8 II. Cultural politics and democracy Is Marx a Pragmatist? Tom Rockmore... 24 The waxing and waning of democracy as a way of life : Some of the economic underpinnings Jane Skinner... 33 Redefining the Meaning of 'Morality': A Chapter in the Cultural Politics of Capitalism Kenneth W. Stikkers... 42 Imperial Irony: Rorty, Richard Henry Pratt and the (...) American Indian Genocide Scott L Pratt... 48 Bruno Latour, American Pragmatism, and the Idea of Non-Human Democracy Leszek Koczanowicz... 59 Beyond culturalism: A Deweyan reading of the expansion of 'Ndrangheta Matteo Santarelli... 66 Philosophy as Cultural Politics in Rorty, Shusterman, And Pragmatism Alexander Kremer... 79 III. Food, Semiotics, Society John Dewey: A Culinary Perspective Dorota Koczanowicz... 88 De-Subjectification in Semiotics: Argumentations, Self-Defense and Signs of Opposing Forces Martin Svantner... 95 IV. Book Reviews Democracy and Consensus: Review Essay of Leszek Koczanowicz's POLITICS OF DIALOGUE John Ryder... 111 Pragmatism Hotel. R. Calcaterra, G. Maddalena & G. Marchetti : lL PRAGMATISMO. DALLE ORIGINI AGLI SVILUPPI CONTEMPORANEl Brunella Antomarini... 117. (shrink)

Review of Kremer's book on Barry Miller's approach to God. (I have discussed Miller's argument from contingency in other publications.).

I argue that beliefs about the identity or distinctness of objects are necessary to explain some normal inferential transitions between thoughts in humans. Worries about vicious regress are not powerful enough to dismantle such an argument. As an upshot, the idea that thinkers “trade on” identity without any corresponding belief remains somewhat mysterious.

The article aims to contribute to the sociological theory of the welfare state by addressing a fundamental puzzle of social policy, namely, the weakness of its claim to be a rational effort of society dealing with problems of social integration. Drawing on the work of Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, I distinguish between the cultural or ideational side of the welfare state and the social engineering or outcome side, arguing to take the rhetoric and symbolism of social policy more seriously. The integration of (...) society is more due to the communicative action of social policy than to its organizational quality. As early as the axial age civilizations, symbolism and ideology emerged as an autonomous field of social conflict and societal union. Taking ancient Israel as an example, I argue that societal integration may take place even in the absence of strong institutional correlates of social politics. This can help to explain why the welfare state in modern society is compatible with ever-increasing economic and social inequality. (shrink)

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted limitation to (...) the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

This article discusses the metatheoretical foundations of a critical realist approach to critical discourse analysis and counterposes them to insufficiently realist tendencies in Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, on the one hand, and anti-realist post-Marxist discourse theory on the other. The first section argues that Fairclough's approach is progressive in many ways, but lacks metatheoretical rigour with respect to important demarcation problems. These mainly concern CDA's understanding of discourse as mediating entity, its underlying dialectical-relational approach and overarching concept of social (...) practices. The discussion of Fairclough's approach necessitates a treatment of the relation of discourse and epistemology, in which the heritage of Foucault plays a crucial role and a brief engagement with ideology, in which Althusser is a major point of departure. The thesis is advanced that, among other things, Althusserian and Foucauldian residues in CDA's metatheory esta.. (shrink)

Where humans can manipulate and integrate the information they receive in subtle and ever-changing ways from context to context, computers need structured and context-free background information of a sort which ontologies can help to provide. A domain ontology captures the stable, highly general and commonly accepted core knowledge for an application domain. The domain at issue here is that of the life sciences, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics. Contemporary life science research includes components drawn from physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine (...) and many other areas, and all of these dimensions, as well as fundamental philosophical issues, must be taken into account in the construction of a domain ontology. Here we describe the basic features of domain ontologies in the life sciences and show how they can be used. (shrink)